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More Proof That I Am Actually A White Person

That headline will be massively funny to those who were up ’til all hours Sunday night at World Fantasy. For the rest of you:

Have you seen the video where the store employees show that the Face Tracking software on HP’s computers don’t track black faces? If you haven’t, go look now, it is really funny. When I saw that I wanted to test if it was true for other HP webcams, so I pulled a system from our testing lab and tried it out. The Face Tracker easily tracked me, but it also tracked a darker-skinned co-worker. I then turned the backlight correction off (which made the picture darker and more like the video linked above). The Face Tracker could no longer track my co-worker, but could still track me.

So forget the pencil test, the brown bag test, and the one-drop rule. Technology has given us a far better way to determine who is black in these times, and it is the Face Tracking algorithm in HP MediaCenters!

That’s not really a grammar quibble; it’s a style quibble. And it’s not a particularly well-founded one. See Language Log‘s treatement, which includes this quote from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage:

Two general statements can be made about what these crtics say concerning myself: first, they do not like it, and second, they do not know why.

MWDEU goes further, ending it’s lengthy entry on “myself” with:

You will observe that almost all the instances of first and second person reflexive pronouns here occur in contexts where the speaker or writer is referring to himself or herself as a subject of the discourse, rather than a participant in it. According to discourse analysis this is the way that English ordinarily works.

I don’t see the relevance of the Language Log article. Its written style is dealing with the use of “such as myself”, which is not the context in which Tempest is writing. Towards the end, it includes two examples of people using the language more casually in spoken English. I have no great quarrel with that, because I’m quite capable of forgetting the precise subject of a sentence by the time I get around to the end of it and may find myself guessing wrong. When I’m reviewing a blog post before submitting it, not so much. And, indeed, I took a moment to check that my use of “myself” in the previous sentence is parallel to the capacity “I” have to forget.

I’d prefer to see the entire MWDEU article before figuring out what to take from it. I’m vaguely disturbed by the accusation that I don’t know why I do not “like” the sentence “The algorithm worked on myself”, and therefore I am not worthy to express the opinion that its use sounds jarring. But if it is what Tempest intended to write, then I apologize for suggesting that it was incorrect.

I'm a speculative fiction writer by night, a media critic and culture columnist by day, and an activist blogger in the interstices. I enjoy science fiction, fantasy, short stories, harshing your squee about that thing you love, and squeeing hard about that thing I love, in that order.